i6o FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
dream of the soul that had once loved Gautama. Calmness of meditation, light and stillness, detachment and knowledge, are now seen to be the highest powers of man. And this new realisation constantly reinforced by new admirers, will do its great work, not within the Buddhist order, but outside it, in the eventual modification of some other system. The conscious aim of the order as such will be to maintain its first condition of purity, truth, and ardour. The unconscious aim of the world without will be to assimilate more and more of the overflow of idealism that comes from within it, more and more of the personal impress left by One in whom all men's aspirations have been fulfilled. From this point we can see that the Order itself must some day die out in India, from sheer philosophical inanition and the want of a new Buddha. But its influence on the faiths outside it will echo and re-echo, ever deepening and intensifying.
Those faiths were, as we have seen, three in number—(i) Jaina; (2) Arya-Vedic; and (3) popular unorganised beliefs. It would appear, therefore, that the citigen-bhakta would necessarily belong to one or other of the groups. Alreadly Jainism must have been a force acting, as we have seen, to unify the Arya-Vedic and the popular unorganised beliefs, giving its first impetus, in fact, to the evolution of what would afterwards be Hinduism, and this process Buddhism, with its immense aggressiveness for the redemption of man, would greatly intensify.
